Decolonizing Research - Indigenous Research Methodologies in Western Academic Institutions

The Deep Water Initiative (DWI), Student Union, and the Center for Writing and Scholarship at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) would like to invite you – this Fall – to an online academic panel that will explore the question: How do scholars, from a diversity of backgrounds, in increasingly challenging times, appropriately adopt Indigenous Research Methodologies to their research from within Western academic institutions?

The current social and political climate within the US presents students of the Western academic institution with a unique opportunity to engage in a dialogue about the role that research can play in decolonizing institutional paradigms. How can scholars, from all walks of life, redefine the current boundaries of our academic paradigms by applying Indigenous Research Methodologies and Indigenous Research Paradigms to their work? Furthermore, in an increasingly challenging research environment, how do scholars apply these methodologies within a theoretical and qualitative framework and maintain the integrity of relationality – a central principle to Indigenous research?

Can scholars from all walks of life, and all corners of the academic world, re-cover, re-organize, re-create, and “re-search back” by standing in solidarity with alternative ontological and epistemological constructs?[1]

In the past decade Indigenous scholars, and scholars of color, have presented the academic world with a wide range of alternative methodologies to do just that. These methodologies form part of a greater collection of methodological approaches that can be grouped under the umbrella of an Indigenous Research Paradigm. The goal of this paradigm stretches beyond decolonization in that it aims to offer scholars with a non-Western research paradigm that highlights the communal aspects of ontology, axiology, and epistemology of the colonized “Other”.[2] The question remains how do scholars in the West participate in the application of this world-view to re-present research?

This panel will take place at 06:00 PM Pacific Time on the 19th of October. Zoom details will be sent to all registered participants a few days before the event. 

Panelists include Dr. Dorothy Christian, Dr. Rachel Burrage, Dr. T. Noelani Perreira and Ms. Mariel Belanger.

Moderated by Dr. Melissa Nelson

[1]Archibald, Jo-Ann, Jenny Bol Jun Lee-Morgan, Jason De Santolo, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds. Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology. United Kingdom: ZED Books, 2019.

[2] Bagele, Chilisa. Indigenous Research Methodologies. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020.